Mrs. Longbow--Amelia E. Longbow, to designate her at once by the name that she made illustrious--was of the older school of philanthropists, who combined militant activity with the literary graces and a tremendous sense of personal dignity. She could despise men and yet receive them in her drawing-room without embarrassment; she could wage a bitter warfare on wickedness and, when deeply stirred, write a tolerable sonnet. She was indefatigable in her labors, but she was never, to my knowledge, flurried or hurried. A large presence, she moved through life with the splendid serenity of a steam-roller. She was capable of prodigious labor, but not of idleness. Whatever her hands found to do she did with all her might--and in her own way. At one time or another she was engaged in reforming most things that are susceptible of improvement or of disturbance. If she did not leave the world better than she found it, the fault was the world’s, not hers. It was a considerable shock to me that she should leave the world at all, so necessary had she seemingly become to its proper administration, let alone its progress. I read the news of her death in London just as I was sailing for home after a summer’s holiday, and I felt a touch of pride that I had known the woman whose career was written large that day in the journals of a sister nation. But, as I reflected, neither America nor England had waited till her death to pay their homage. She had lived long, and on many great occasions during three decades she had been signally and publicly honored as the most remarkable of her sex. The cable-despatches announced that she left a comfortable fortune, and leading articles agreed that she was wholly admirable. I felt sure that she would have regarded the praise as unmerited if she had not shown her ability by leaving a respectable inheritance to her children. I had reason also to believe that she never lost her self-confident assurance of her own worth: she died, the newspapers said, quite peacefully. Once back in New York, I took an early occasion to call on my friend Charles Longbow. I had always liked him ever since the day that I fished him, a shivering mite, out of the skating-pond at school. I had been his chum thereafter until the end of my college course. Though I could not emulate his distinction in scholarship or public speaking, I could at least be useful to him, by virtue of my year’s seniority, in protecting him from the consequences of his mother’s celebrity. I even did him some service by pushing him into the thick of undergraduate life. I was really very fond of him, and I was sure he liked me.